The short version
In 2019, we were two roommates in a Bushwick apartment with a 44-inch Canon wide-format printer crammed into what was supposed to be a dining nook. Rachel had just finished her MFA at Pratt. I (Marcus) was working at a framing shop on Atlantic Avenue and spending half my paycheck on prints from artists I found on Instagram.
The problem was obvious: the prints we could afford looked cheap, and the good ones cost $300+ before framing. So Rachel reached out to a few artists she knew from school and asked if they'd let us produce small editions. Five of them said yes. We printed the first batch on a Saturday in March, listed them on our site by Monday, and sold out the initial run of 120 prints in three weeks.
Today we work with 40+ artists and ship about 900 prints a month. We moved the printer out of the apartment in late 2020 (our landlord was thrilled) and into a proper studio on Flushing Avenue near the Navy Yard. Rachel handles artist relations and color proofing. I run operations and somehow became the shipping department.
Every print we sell is giclée-printed in our studio on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm cotton rag paper, using 12-color pigment inks. We do our own proofing, our own trimming, and our own packing. Nothing gets outsourced. If a print has our label on the back, someone in this room touched every step of its production.